Tag Archive: The Hunger Games

2. Saturday was my youngest daughter’s prom. There was all the pomp and circumstance – the right dress, the right shoes, the fancy hairdo, etc. And to top it off, I have the fortune to have a terribly pragmatic daughter, who has similarly pragmatic friends. They decided to eschew the typical evening of financial irresponsibility – no limo, no hundred dollar meal at an overpriced restaurant… no. We have always been a home away from home for many of these young men and women, and they decided they would rather have “Mom’s” home cooking. Even then, all they wanted was one of her pasta meals. Of course, my wife went all out. Since all they wanted was a nice pasta dinner, she poured her time into the atmosphere of the event: fancy candles, flower arrangements, nice china, punch… just nice enough to let them all know it was a special event, but simple enough that they wouldn’t need to feel guilty about the work that she put into it. The woman’s a saint. I’m in real trouble when she gets her glasses replaced. 🙂

3. Friday, my parents got in from Oklahoma. My sister put together a nice dinner for the occassion, or so we thought. It turns out that the whole thing was a surprise belated anniversary party for my wife and I. See, January was our twenty-fifth anniversary, and we had been toying with the idea of splurging on a trip to Hawaii. However, between the economy, rising fuel costs and air fares, our daughter getting ready to go to college, and life in general not quite being as cooperative as we would like, we decided to postpone the trip for another year or so. Now, the rest of the family evidently thought that wasn’t good enough, so they threw us a nice dinner, and pooled their nickles and dimes, handing us a little over a thousand dollars to spend on a trip. What can you say to that?

4. Figured out (I think) what part of my problem with my pocast recording of my novel and promo was. I was banging my head against the wall on this one for the last few weeks. I was taking my raw feed from my reads, editing out all the breathing and stammering to get a decent base track, then running it through GoldWave Editor Pro for noise reduction, then running the resulting wav file through Levelator to level the sound, then filling with music and sound effects. I couldn’t find anything wrong with my process no matter how many times I looked it over. The sound quality just wasn’t good enough. I finally noticed on Friday that the mic I’m using was set to record the source in a 16 bit mp3 format. There was nothing wrong with my process. I was suffering from a classic case of gigo (garbage in, garbage out). My process was doing the best it could with the low quality source material I was feeding into it. I have now set the mic to record as 32 bit wav. Hopefully that will give me a higher fidelity sound file to work with. Unfortunately, this means that I get to start all over on the whole thing. 😦

It’s taken a little longer to post this review than I expected it would. That’s mainly because I wasn’t able to stop after reading Suzanne Collins’ first novel in this series. “The Hunger Games” is the first in the trilogy that carries over into “Catching Fire” and “Mockingjay”. It’s the story of Katniss Everdeen, a seventeen year old girl who becomes a tribute in the Hunger Games, a twisted gladiatorial competition in which … more